- Edwards-Jones, Imogen.
Fashion Babylon.
London: Corgi Books, 2006.
ISBN 0-552-15443-1.
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This is a hard-to-classify but interesting and enjoyable
book. I'm not sure even whether to call it fiction or
nonfiction: the author has invented a notional co-author,
“Anonymous”, who relates, condensed into a
single six-month fashion season, anecdotes from a
large collection of sources within the British fashion
industry, all of which the author vouches for as authentic.
Celebrities appear under their own names, and the stories
involving them (often bizarre) are claimed to be genuine.
If you're looking for snark, cynicism, cocaine, cigarettes, champagne,
anorexia, and other decadence and dissipation, you'll find it, but
you'll also take away a thorough grounding in the economics of a
business fully as bizarre as the software industry. The gross margin
is almost as high and, except for the brand name and associated logos,
there is essentially zero protection of intellectual property (as long
as you don't counterfeit the brand, you can knock-off any design, just
as you can create a work-alike for almost any non-patent-protected
software product and sell it for a tiny fraction of the price of the
prototype). The vertiginous plunge from the gross margin to the meagre
bottom line is mostly promotional hype: blow-outs to “build the
brand”. So it may increasingly become in the software business
as increases in functionality in products appeal to a smaller and
smaller fraction of the customer base, or even reduce usability
(Windows Vista, anybody?).
A U.S. Edition will be published in
February 2008.
December 2007 